The Russian athletics federation has chosen Dmitry Shlyakhtin as president in an attempt to wash away allegations of widespread doping and have the ban on its team lifted before the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Senior sports officials unanimously elected Shlyakhtin, a former rugby and athletics coach. The appointment of a president from outside the federation is part of a purge of Russian athletics’ governing body promised by the sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, after the IAAF indefinitely banned the country from competition in November.

Shlyakhtin will head an “anti-crisis team” to implement reform, the results of which will be presented before a IAAF conference in March. Mutko said he expected the IAAF to allow Russia to compete in Rio in August.

“The task is simple, to return Russian athletics to an international level and restore the trust of IAAF and [Wada],” Shlyakhtin said on Saturday at the Russian Olympics Committee headquarters.

Mutko added that British anti-doping specialists would test Russia’s list of possible Olympic contenders three times a month in the lead-up to the Games. “We are upset and we want to return to world athletics,” he said.

“There are no problems with us returning because the majority of our athletes are conscientious. Our athletes are on international anti-doping registers, and to accuse us of hiding our competitors [from testing] is baseless.”

A report by a special Wada commission in November accused the Russian anti-doping agency of working with officials and coaches to cover up widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes. Among those suspected of abuse are London 2012 Olympic winners.

The second instalment for the first time cast suspicion on Vladimir Putin: the then-IAAF president Lamine Diack reportedly told a lawyer he would cut a deal with the Russian president so that nine of his athletes suspected of doping wouldn’t compete at the 2013 world championships in Moscow, an accusation that a top Russian official this week called “baffling.”

It also said the price of the broadcasting rights for the 2013 worlds had been raised from $6m to $25m after a meeting in a Moscow hotel between then-head of the Russian athletics federation Valentin Balakhnichev and Diack’s son Papa Massata.

Shlyakhtin and Gennady Alyoshin, Russia’s lead negotiator with the IAAF, declined to comment on this finding when asked by the Guardian, saying that criminal allegations were outside their purview.

Russian officials have decried the Wada commission’s findings as a “political hit job,” but the November ban left them little choice but to pledge to meet all IAAF demands for reform. Although Alyoshin said the new presidium of the Russian athletics federation would not include members who had previously worked in the governing body, not all faces there will be new: Mikhail Butov will remain general secretary, despite having occupied the post since 2008, during years that Wada alleges saw widespread doping. Butov had been Shlyakhtin’s main rival for president but withdrew from the race along with high-jumper Alexander Shustov in what appeared to be a compromise deal.

The IAAF has accepted the “extreme gravity” of the offences revealed in an investigation of its past corruption and says it will use the Wada recommendations as the basis for reform of track and field’s international governing body.

Sebastian Coe said that the world athletics body “has an enormous task ahead of it to restore public confidence.”

“The weakness of IAAF’s governance, which has been exposed, allowed individuals at the head of the previous regime at the IAAF to delay the following of normal procedures in certain doping cases,” the IAAF said in a statement.

Lord Coe said the corruption revealed in the Wada report “is totally abhorrent, and a gross betrayal of trust by those involved”. He said many of the recommendations made by Wada’s Independent Commission were already part of the reforms being put in place by the new administration “but we will now urgently consider all of the new recommendations and will incorporate them quickly into that reform programme”.